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Wednesday, May 12

America's Greatest 3D Arcade Hits
MacSoft ships America's Greatest Arcade Hits 3D for Mac. Arcade Hits is jam-packed with four exciting games, including:

America's Greatest Arcade Hits 3D for Mac is available at retail outlets nationwide for a suggested retail price of $19.99, as well as through secure online transactions at www.gtstore.com

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Wednesday, May 5

Railroad Tycoon II Demo Released
The Railroad Tycoon II Mac demo is now available. This demo lets you play all of the game features on two scenarios (Britain and Eastern US), and also lets you try out the editor (save is disabled in the editor).
Click here to download the Mac demo (53MB)

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Unreal 224 News
Westlake Interactive had this to say about the 224 patch for Unreal:
The new 224 patch has just been released on the PC, so we wanted to let people know where the Mac version stands. We have been working on the Mac code, updating to an internal 223 version. This hopefully will make the transition to 224 smoother, although we don't know how much code has been changed from 223 to 224 (since that includes nearly 50 internal versions at Epic it could be a lot). We should have the 224 code in the next day or so, and then we will begin to rev the engine from 223 to 224.

Of course as usual, the patch hits us at fairly bad time. We working feverishly to get Falcon 4 out the door this week, finalizing demos of Total Annihilation and Unreal Tournament to show at E3 next week, and of course a large portion of our staff will be gone to E3 next week.

Best guess is it will probably take a few weeks to get the 224 patch up and stable on the Mac, so we're aiming for sometime around the weekend of the 22nd. Check the web site for status updates. Please don't email us asking for status, it just takes time away from actually working on the patch!

Click here for the current 220 patch.

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Tuesday, April 27

Civilization a Call to Power
Westlake has announced the beginning of development of a great new game for MacSoft, Civilization: Call To Power. Originally developed by Activision, Civ: CTP is takes the Civilization game series to a new level.

The new game has tons of cool stuff including: 16 bit high res graphics, new units, all new wonders, multiplayer support, and the ability to play until 3000 AD (with space based units and more!).

Civilization: Call To Power for Mac is scheduled to ship in time for Christmas 1999.

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$10 Sale at Mac-O-Rama
Ten bucks, ten buck, ten bucks! It's "Old-School" week at MAC-O-RAMA Get the games that you grew up with at a price that won't break the bank!

Check these out:

And get FREE Priority Mail shipping (in the US) on these great titles:

In case you missed our out-of-this world sale last week, all STAR TREK titles are specially priced for another week!

Sale starts April 26, 1999 and ends May 2, 1999. Prices good while supplies last. FREE gift wrapping available upon request.

MAC-O-RAMA is located at http://www.mac-o-rama.com

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Friday, April 23

Half-Life Coming to the Mac!
Yesterday, MacAddict unveiled in an exclusive that Half-Life is indeed coming to the Mac. Today, we have some answers to questions you may have about Half-Life.

Half-Life is the uber-game that took home Game Of The Year awards from approximately EVERY gaming rag in existence, and you need to visit http://www.sierrastudios.com/games/half-life/bot.html and see what it's all about.

Q. When's it going to be released already?
A. The golden master is due at Sierra on November 15 to be in your hands in time for Christmas. I'm going for a somewhat accelerated development schedule, though, so hopefully I'll be done by mid-September.

Q. Why so long?
A. For various contractual reasons work on the port did not begin until April 1. Also, consider the pedigree of Valve -- most of their engineers came from Microsoft, and consequently their code is very Windows-centric. Significant sections of the code are so closely tied to Windows (and MFC) that it's easier to rewrite them from scratch than attempt to convert them over to another OS. Once I'm over that hurdle, things should go much faster since I'll be working with id's Quake engine code which has already been ported to everything in existence.

Q. Who's behind all of this?
A. Valve is the original PC developer. Sierra, the original publisher of Half-Life for PC, is also publishing the Mac version. I've seen in the press, but not heard directly from them, that they're getting back into the Mac market in a big way. The port itself is being handled through Logicware, my new employer. Internally, I'm basically the man on this one -- no one else is working on Half-Life and I'm not working on anything else.

Q. Can I be a beta tester?
A. I believe Sierra will be handling the QA internally.

Q. Where and how can I get the latest updates?
A. There is a one-way announcement list that'll probably get at most one or two posts a week. To subscribe, point your browser at http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/hl-mac-news.

Q. What machines will be supported?
A. Everything with a G3 (including the iMacs) will be supported one way or another. Earlier G3 machines with with Rage II chips will probably have to use the software renderer. Faster 603- and 604-based PowerMacs will probably be OK, and almost certainly if they have a Rage Pro or better 3D card, but I can't say what the final performance will be until the game is final.

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